Posts by: Jon Cartwright

I’m sorry to say that, having taken a day’s leave on Monday, this snippet of news (above) about ScienceDebate 2008 escaped my attention. According to a poll conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of ScienceDebate 2008 and Research!America, 85% of US adults think agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate on science in the run up to the November election.

(For those of you who have missed the protests of the 37,000 signatories of ScienceDebate 2008, see my last news story on their progress.)

Shawn Otto, CEO of Science Debate 2008, gave the following statement in a press release:

“This topic has been virtually ignored by the candidates, but this poll shows that Americans of all walks know how important science and technology are to our health and way of life. We’ve heard a lot about lapel pins and preachers. But tackling the big science challenges is critical to our children’s future — to the future of the country and the future of the planet. Americans want to know that candidates take these issues seriously, and the candidates have a responsibility to let voters know what they think.”

The poll also shows that:

• 67% of adults think scientific research has contributed either “a lot” or “a great deal”
• 67% think that scientific evidence, rather than personal belief, should influence science policy
• 69% rate alternative energy as one of the most serious long-term issues
• 53% rate climate change as one of the most serious long-term issues

You can read more here.

I wonder if many other scientists under the wing of the Holy See agree with Jose Gabriel Funes, the head of the Vatican observatory, or whether he’s something of a radical.

In an interview in yesterday’s edition of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes not only admits that he believes in the Big-Bang model of the universe’s creation, he states that humans should be open to the possibility of alien life. “Just as there’s a multiplicity of creatures on earth,” he says, “there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God.”

To be clear, Funes is in no way dismissing the first two chapters of Genesis. In fact, he sees “no contrast” between the notion of aliens and the Catholic faith. The other beings might also be worshipping God, he says.

The interview is headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother”.

Astrophysicists have known for more than three decades that black holes shouldn’t be totally black — they should emit a certain amount of “Hawking radiation” from the production of particle–antiparticle pairs around their event horizons. But detecting Hawking radiation has so far proved tricky, mostly because its temperature would be at least eight orders of magnitude lower than the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

One way round this problem, as Ulf Leonhardt and colleagues from the University of St Andrews, UK, demonstrated earlier this year, might be to create systems that are analogous to black holes in the lab in which the temperature of the radiation is much higher. The researchers showed that a pulse of light travelling through a fibre can behave like a black hole, and, although they didn’t actually detect Hawking radiation, they showed that in principle it should be possible.

Now, in a paper published today in the New Journal of Physics, is seems as though Leonhardt’s group are one step closer. Rather than use pulses of light as an analogous system to a black hole, they have built a system of water waves. I confess that I haven’t yet studied this paper carefully enough to describe with any certainty what the researchers have done, suffice it to say they claim to have observed “negative-frequency” waves, the classical analogue of anti-particles which are the hallmarks of Hawking radiation.

In a brief email conversation last week, Leonhardt told me that they are not yet sure whether this is enough to constitute an observation of a classical analogue of Hawking radiation: “Hawking’s effect is a quantum phenomenon, a spontaneous quantum process, but like all spontaneous processes it can be stimulated. This is what we did, we sent in waves and saw a tiny bit of stimulated negative-frequency waves, but there are quantitative differences between experiment and theory that we do not understand yet.”

Of course, if and when Leonhardt’s group do find negative-frequency waves that agree with theory, there will be a debate as to whether they are “real” Hawking radiation. No doubt you will be seeing more of this on physicsworld.com soon.

“So what would you do if string theory is wrong?” asks string theorist Moataz Emam of Clark University, US, in a paper posted on arXiv yesterday. It’s obvious, you might think. String theorists would briefly mourn the 40 years of misspent speculation and leave furtively through the back door, while anti-string theorists would celebrate in light of their vindication.

Not so, says Emam — string theory will continue to prosper, and might even become its own discipline independent of physics and mathematics.

Oddly, the reason Emam gives for this prediction is precisely the same reason why many physicists despise string theory. For example, in reducing the 10 dimensions of string theory to our familiar four, string theorists have to fashion a “landscape” of at least 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions. Emam says that such a huge number of solutions — of which only one exists for our universe — may make string theory unattractive, but in studying them physicists are gaining “deep insights into how a physical theory generally works”:

So even if someone shows that the universe cannot be based on string theory, I suspect that people will continue to work on it…The theory would be studied by physicists and mathematicians who might no longer consider themselves either. They will continue to derive beautiful mathematical formulas and feed them to the mathematicians next door. They also might, every once in a while, point out interesting and important properties concerning the nature of a physical theory which might guide the physicists exploring the actual theory of everything over in the next building.

Peter Woit, author of the string-theory polemic Not Even Wrong, notes on his blog that physicists looking to pursue string theory for its beauty should “go and work in a maths department”:

The argument Emam is making reflects in somewhat extreme form a prevalent opinion among string theorists, that the failure of hopes for the theory, even if real, is not something that requires them to change what they are doing. This attitude is all too likely to lead to disaster.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, and what appears to be most major media outlets, Alia Sabur (pictured above) has broken the record for the world’s youngest professor.

Sabur, 19, will begin teaching physics next month at the Department of Advanced Technology Fusion at Konkuk University, Korea. It will be just another entry on the teenager’s laden CV, which reveals she received a bachelor’s degree at 14 and a masters in materials science at 17.

Something might be awry here, though. There’s nothing wrong with the media adopting the American English definition of “professor” (i.e. any university teacher) — after all, Sabur was born in New York. But it appears that the previous record holder was Scottish physicist Colin Maclaurin, who was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen when he was a few months over 19 in 1717.

I might have to explain to our international readers that in the UK “professor” is a more distinguished title, reserved for heads-of-departments and the like. (At least it has been as far back as any of us at Physics World can vouch for.) Sabur, I note, is yet to defend her PhD.

Does this mean the titles of Sabur and Maclaurin are being confused? Does Maclaurin, who is credited with the mathematical “Maclaurin series”, deserve to keep his accolade?

Of course, science was a considerably narrower discipline back in the 18th century, and achieving a professorship might have taken a little less time than it does today (it certainly wouldn’t have required a PhD). But Maclaurin can’t defend his honour, and offhand I don’t know enough about science in the early 1700s to cast a vote either way.

Do any of you have any thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

On April 3 last year, the left-hand side of the Fermilab Today website had a graphical weather forecast depicting storm clouds. It was a fitting metaphor for the mood of the US lab, which had recently discovered that one of the “quadrupole” magnets it supplied the European lab CERN for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had failed a preliminary test. On the right-hand side of the website, Pier Oddone, the director of Fermilab, admitted they had taken “a pratfall on the world stage”.

Indeed they had. The failure meant they had to replace all similar magnets with redesigned models and skip the low-energy test runs that were due to take place before winter. It also added to the problems that forced CERN to delay the LHC’s (already repeatedly delayed) start up from May to July this year.

Now, though, everything looks to be well again. On the right-hand side of Fermilab Today, Oddone writes that the first of the replaced magnets has passed the test it failed last year. He writes that the 50 or so scientists, engineers and technicians at CERN who made the repairs deserve “a crown”. And the left-hand side of the website is forecasting sunshine.

The original problem was that the magnets had inadequate support to withstand the forces produced during “quenching”. This is when a magnet gets warmed up above its 1.9 K operating temperature, and could happen happen, for example, if one of the LHC’s proton beams veers off course. Last Friday the replaced magnet passed the one-hour test designed to simulate quenching.

“Everyone commissioning the LHC,” writes Oddone, “both accelerator and detectors, is racing excitedly towards colliding-beam operation and the great physics results that we can almost taste.”

With $5000 of his research grant left burning a hole in his wallet earlier this year, Frank Mueller, a computer scientist from North Carolina State University, decided to hit the shops and buy eight Playstation 3 games consoles. Not for pleasure, you understand — no, Mueller figured that with eight Playstations strapped together he could create a modestly powered supercomputer. “The cost for performance is unbeatable,” he says.

Mueller’s “cluster” of games consoles doesn’t quite break into the TOP500 list of supercomputers. But if he had another $4m lying about, he reckons he could string together 10,000 Playstations to make the fastest supercomputer in the world.

So, could physicists use Playstations to save a few trips to Blue Gene? “Yes,” says Mueller, “if they are willing to substantially rewrite their most computer-intensive code portions in a non-standard API.” That’s the Application Programming Interface, for those of you who don’t know.

On his website, Mueller notes that he uses his Playstation cluster for “educational purposes”.

You don’t need a research paper to tell you that tabloid newspapers aren’t the best source of scientific information.

Or do you? Maxwell Boykoff and Maria Mansfield from the University of Oxford, UK, seem to think so. In a paper published today in Environmental Research Letters, they have surveyed nearly 1000 articles dating back seven years from the UK’s most-read tabloids: the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express and the Mirror. It seems that around a quarter of the articles have strayed from scientific consensus — that is, that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are “very likely” to be causing the observed global warming over the past half century.

This conclusion is buttressed by interviews with journalists and editors, as well as examples of dodgy environmental reporting. Here’s a few to whet your appetite:

“Experts are still arguing over whether [global warming] is a natural phenomenon, or the effect of industrial societies releasing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere…” (Ivor Key of the Express)

“It seems that the most significant global warming is caused by the hotheads who are anxious to believe their own propaganda.” (Commentary in the Mail on Sunday)

“This confirms what I have been saying for years — cars do not cause global warming. Now we learn that all along it was bloody sheep and cows.” (Jermey Clarkson, motoring journalist and regular aristarch of environmentalists, commentating in the Sun after learning that methane emissions from cattle are significant in global warming)

There’s an interview with Boykoff on our sister website, environmentalresearchweb.